We slipped away from the group and made our way to a friend of a friend of someone’s cousin who graduated three years ago’s house, where the party was going down in the basement. We got there earlier than everyone else and Grace found us a suitably dark and secluded corner where we weren’t likely to be spotted making out, but all I could think about was the sex we were supposed to be having later, so I just kept drinking.

The music grew louder and the basement slowly filled up with zombies and witches and pirates and sexy iterations of entirely unsexy things, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a papier-mâché planet Pluto in a bikini, and Madison Carlson—for reasons I will never understand—as a slutty corncob.

Grace leaned in and kissed me quickly, then went back to watching costumed people cram into the space.

“I’m going to stop going to the graveyard,” she said quietly, her words ever so slightly slurred. “That’s something I’ve never told you. I visit him almost every day, at the place where he’s buried. I’m going to stop, though. For you.”

I was taken aback. I’d come to accept Dom’s ghostly presence as a fact of life, a condition of dating Grace Town. She would always dress like him. She would always smell like him. She would always visit his grave. But here she was, giving up a small piece of him already.

“I’d like that,” I said quickly, without thinking, because now that she’d offered it, I realized it was something I wanted. I wanted her to stop spending so much time with her dead boyfriend, lying on the grass above his decomposing corpse, crying tears that seeped into the earth to rest upon his coffin.

“And I don’t want you to feel like I’m, like, settling for you or whatever,” she continued, still staring straight ahead. “I’ve never gotten along with anyone the way I get along with you.”

I had to resist the temptation, in that moment, to ask her if Dom and I were standing side by side, both whole, both alive, which one of us she would choose. Because I knew, still, that it would be him. For a long time, it would be him. Maybe always. And I felt the tear in my heart rip open a little bit more. Here she was, doing her best to declare her feelings to me, and all it did was make the hurt pierce a little deeper.

“You’ve been drinking. I don’t want you to make any decisions tonight. Wait until you’re sober. Think it over. I want you to be sure.” I want you to be sure that you can let him go.

Grace turned to me and looked at me for a long time, her focus moving from one of my eyes to the other and then back again every few seconds.

“What?” I said after a while.

“Most guys would be assholes about all this. You’ve been so cool.”

“Why would I be an asshole?” I was forcing myself to be cooler about it than I actually felt, but I couldn’t say that—being a dick would only make her run in the other direction. “You’ve been up-front about everything since the beginning.” Except the car crash and dead boyfriend and the graveyard and the clothes, that is.

She did the eye thing again twice more, then closed hers and leaned in and kissed me. I watched her the whole time to make sure she didn’t open her eyes, like this was some kind of indicator of whether she really meant what she was saying. Grace kept her eyes closed, and when I could feel the kiss coming to an end, I jammed mine shut as she pulled away. And I thought, How could anyone kiss anyone like that and not mean it?

“How long do we have to wait here before we go back to your place?” Grace said.

My heart kicked into a gallop. Oh yes. The losing of the virginity. I’d momentarily forgotten about it.

“I want to see everyone first. Hang out for a bit. Wait until my parents are asleep.”

What I really wanted—what I didn’t tell Grace that I wanted—was for people to see us together, to catch us, to accuse us of being more than friends with sly smiles on their faces. I wanted our relationship to have solid tethers outside of us, like the more people who knew about us, the more reasons she’d have to stay. We were in a Schrödinger’s cat relationship, neither dead nor alive because we had not been observed. And maybe it was better that way. Maybe it was better to be unobserved, to be in flux, because there was every chance that being observed would kill us. I knew it was dangerous. After all, if nobody knew, then nobody would know if it didn’t work out. My heartache would be private. But it was a gamble I was willing to take.

So, as the room grew loud with chatter, I kissed her. We talked and drank and flirted, Grace becoming more light and open with each sip of alcohol, and I kissed her, hoping that someone we knew would see, would point, would shout our names.

And eventually, an hour or so later, someone did.

“I knew it!” shouted Heslin, and some great coil of tension that had been sprung tightly inside of me all night was released. We had been seen. We had been observed. There was someone outside of us who could testify that we were real. That we had been here. “I fucking knew it!”

“Shh,” I hissed at Heslin, because even though I wanted him to know, I didn’t want Grace to know I wanted him to know.

Grace pulled back from me immediately and stood up and said, “You ready to go? I’m gonna go get my things.”

I nodded and watched her weave her way through the costumed crowd to get her coat.

Heslin was still grinning at me. “How long have you been banging her for?”

“Please don’t tell anyone, we’re trying to keep it quiet.” It didn’t seem necessary to inform him that I had not, as of yet, banged her at all.

“Your secret’s safe with me,” said Heslin as he leaned down to muss my hair. We rarely spoke at school, but apparently this insider knowledge of my almost sex life somehow warranted a closer bond.

“I should go find her,” I said as I stood up.

“Yeah, you should,” said Heslin, clapping me on the back.